Missingno. Name

[Kurai]

But didn't they forget about Missingno.? Why would they translate something they forgot and ment to delete??? And why would they need to translate it to keep it as a place holder?

 

[Dewgong]

yep, the pokedex number is 000.
are you asking if the translated games have a japanese dictionary? not quite sure about that... if you scrambled the hall of fame, you do see japanese chars in the glitch names sometimes. and there is glitch pokemon like chiisai-u or whatever. not sure if all the chars are in the translated ones though, i've only ever seen vowels pop up.

edit: they didn't forget about missingno, the translated games had to have test pokemon as well. what they did forget was to remove missingno when they were done. but... there has to be a placeholder for 000, right? that confuses me.

editedit: they would need to translate it because if the pokemon had chars in its name that weren't supported in the game, some other glitch would probably happen. something like that. not even sure.

 

[Karkat Vantas]

It's possible they used that as a name as reminder so that the programmers wouldn't translate the names.

Not related, but somewhat interesting: 'M is apparently named after the GYM tiles in the overworld.

 

[Kurai]

are you asking if the translated games have a japanese dictionary?

I'm not asking that. -_-

 

[Dewgong]

i wasn't talking to you. i was talking to doctor jimmy but i didn't use a quote tag because i was posting at the same time you were, but you posted first.

 

[Kurai]

:sweatdrop: Sorry.

 

[Doctor Jimmy]

It appears that the original games might have some Japanese characters left over. Still, they needed a placeholder for 000; otherwise, when something requests that slot, the game would crash. And, the English translators probably needed a way to indicate that slot is a missing number and shouldn't be programmed otherwise.

 

[Dewgong]

it's fine lisaw. :3

also yes they do have characters left over, but i'm really unsure if it's all of them... i tried looking and i've really only seen vowels and yo.

 

[Kurai]

I still wonder though, do you think that there's even the slightest possibility that it could be a discareded idea for a Pokemon? The reson I bring this up is because I think it's an interesting theory.

 

[Sandstone-Shadow]

It is an interesting theory, but I don't think that it was planned to be another Pokémon. Going off of what IIMarckus said:

Basically, Pokémon RBY have 190 monsters programmed into the game. 151 are normal, of course; all the rest are named “Missingno.” Most of these are just placeholders, but three of them are used by the programming to display sprites (fossil Aerodactyl, fossil Kabutops, and Ghost).

it sounds like there were quite a lot of places that were unfilled. I don't think they would have used MissingNo. as a placeholder if it was supposed to be an actual Pokémon; why not use Caterpie or something, then, for the placeholders? If MissingNo. was meant to be a Pokémon, then it would be just like using a different Pokémon for the placeholders.

 

[Yarnchu]

I'm certain the reason the fossil and ghost sprites are shown is probably to hexadecimal. (like I've said before) As for the name, it's most likely what was mentioned above: the game would crash if for some reason that hex was called upon.

Some symbols were left in, but there is like 46(48?) kana used for hiragana, and another 46/8 used for katakana. It would be pointless to remove them all. That's why some glitches still have Japanese names while others don't.

 

[Dewgong]

there was a theory that missingno. was the fourth pokemon that went with moltres, zapdos, and articuno, which i highly doubt. i've heard some people even say it was prototype for lugia, which is even more out there.

i also agree with superyoshi, the reason that the fossil sprites are shown is hexadecimal. aren't those sprites used in the lavender town mansion?

 

[Yarnchu]

Not quite. The Ghost is seen in Pokemon Tower, but Aerodactyl and Kabutops are seen in Pewter Museum.

 

[Dewgong]

oh i figured it was something like that but i never went in the pewter museum so i just figured they were from the tower haha

 

[Kurai]

I don't know much about programming, so can you please clear two things up for me?

1. I'm not completely sure what a placeholder is.

2. What's a hexadecimal?

 

[Yarnchu]

1. A place holder is exactly what its name is. It holds the place of something else. In this case, Missingno. takes up empty spaces that would normally be used for other pokemon.

2. Hexdecimal is similar to decimal, except instead of using like multiples of ten it uses multiples of 16. The numbers are 1-9 and A-F. It is often used for programming.

 

[Kurai]

Thanks for clearing things up. (:

 

[Doctor Jimmy]

From my understanding, a placeholder is used to prevent the game from crashing when trying to access the empty spot. The reason why a placeholder had to be used was because there were several empty spots in the Pokedex, including 000. Let's say your Pokedex looks like this:

000
001 Bulbasaur
002 Ivysaur
003 Venusaur
004 Charmander
005 Charmeleon
006 Charizard
...

Whenever the game accesses 001-006, the corresponding Pokemon will appear. However, 000 doesn't have a Pokemon assigned to it. Because it is not getting the information it requests, the game crashes.

Now, if we had a placeholder:

000 Missingno.
001 Bulbasaur
002 Ivysaur
003 Venusaur
004 Charmander
005 Charmeleon
006 Charizard

Then every time the game would try to access 000, Missingno will appear, and the game continues.

How does Missingno appear? Well, it turns out that there are a lot of empty spots in Pokemon. Let's say that slots 152-200 are used to store the most recent Pokemon that you have seen. And by doing the Old Man trick, you are activating those slots to be used while surfing on the island coast, which is why you can find Ratatta while surfing. However, not all of those slots are filled, and Missingno takes up a couple of those. Since these numbers are called upon randomly, you have a chance of running into Missingno while using these set of numbers.

I hope this makes sense. If not, just dick around TRsRockin for other information.

 

[Kurai]

Thanks. That clears things up even more. Let's continue posing theories; it's becoming quite interesting.